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Wednesday, August 22, 2012

My railroad model doesn't advance very fast because of my other hobbies, I have to split my little free time between them. I like bonsais (http://verenverde.blogspot.com) and build plastic model kits. I like to build StarWars related models. But everything has application in the railroad model, because many buildings come in plastic model kit that you have to mount, glue and paint. That's the reason I'll post also in this blog some of my work in plastic kits. All techniques can be useful for railroad model buildings and scenery.

This is a very useful painting technique in plastic models, and I practiced it for first time in my STAP with Battledroid. It consists in the following steps:

1) Base paint with a metallic color, in my case Aluminium

2) Then airbrush again with gloss varnish:

3) Paint normally with your prefered color
4) Before it's completely dry (but not wet) use adhesive tape fixing it to the new paint layer and quickly strip it out. It will remove your last color layer and aluminium color will appear. But aluminium will suffer no damage because it was protected with the varnish.

You can also use some sharp tool to create those wears in the edges and create scratches:

The only difficult thing is to find the right drying time of the paint to start chipping, and the type of adhesive tape because not all have the same "traction power". I suggest you to start with some wasted adhesive tape (fix it to the table some times before try it in the model) or it can occure it removes too big pieces.

But definitely the effect is much better than painting chips with any other technique, like with darker or lighter halos.